A lot of what you’ve probably seen or read about the
#occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you’re getting it on
the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about
it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really
matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical,
public space, live and in person. That’s where the occupiers are
assembling the rudiments of a movement.

At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around
computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a
humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream.
They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard
Twitter until they’re viral. But for those looking to understand even
the basic facts about what is actually going on—before September 17 and
since—the Internet has been as much a source of confusion as it is
anything else.

For someone who has been following this
movement in gestation as well as implementation, it’s painfully easy to
see which news articles take their bearing entirely from a few Google
searches. Some reporters come to Liberty Plaza looking for Adbusters
staff, or US Day of Rage members, or conspiratorial Obama supporters, or
hackers from Anonymous. They’re briefly disappointed to find none of
the above. Instead, it’s a bunch of people—from round-the-clock
revolutionaries, to curious tourists, to retirees, to zealous
students—spending most of their time in long meetings about supplying
food, conducting marches, dividing up the plaza’s limited space and what
exactly they’re there to do and why. And that’s the point. More than
demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding
Wall Street& what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money.

As is now well known, the anti-consumerist group Adbusters made a call on July 13 for
an occupation of Wall Street. That and a bit of poster art were the
extent of its involvement. Adbusters floated the meme and left the rest
to others. The trouble was, though, that most of the others were meme
floaters, too.

It’s a
movement in formation. As protesters sometimes like to chant, “This Is
Just Practice.”

The occupywallst.org web domain was registered anonymously on July
14, and it soon became the main clearinghouse for information about the
movement’s progress. It remains so now and is getting, on average, about
50,000 unique visitors per day. It’s maintained mainly by a man and
woman who met through the Anarchism section on the web site Reddit.

Soon came US Day of Rage, the project of Alexa O’Brien, an IT content
management strategist. Since March, she has been trying to build a
nationwide movement for radical campaign-finance reform—”One citizen.
One dollar. One vote.”—and decided to peg her efforts to the September
17 action. While she has around 20 organizers working with her in cities
around the country, as far as one leading #occupywallstreet organizer
in New York could tell, it seems like her only colleagues might be
coffee and cigarettes.

Then, of course, there’s Anonymous. The most-wanted hacker-activist
collective indicated that it would join #occupywallstreet in late
August. Within days, the Anons’ presence in the movement was being felt
through Anonymous-branded viral videos, the bombardment of the
movement’s Twitter hashtags (of which there is an ever-growing number)
and rumors of scrutiny from Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, quietly, a group of several hundred mainly young
activists, artists and students started gathering as a “General
Assembly” (GA)—a leaderless, consensus-based decision-making process.
They met weekly in public parks, starting on August 2 and continuing
until the occupation began, with the intention of building an
organizational and tactical framework for the action. It grew out of New
Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, which had recently held a three-week
occupation near City Hall called “Bloombergville” to protest against
austerity measures. They had learned a lot from that and were ready to
try something bigger.

The GA formed an Internet Committee, which quickly became fraught
with infighting about process, security concerns and editorial control.
These problems consumed hours and hours of the whole Assembly’s time.
Their site went up, then down and then finally up again just days before
the occupation began. It is now online at nycga.cc,
but it receives only a small fraction of the traffic of
occupywallst.org. Only on Thursday afternoon did the two sites figure
out how to formally coordinate their activities.

As a result of these hiccups, in the lead-up and early days of the
occupation, media coverage almost always associated it with meme
floaters like Adbusters, US Day of Rage and Anonymous. But none of them
were especially responsible for what would be happening on the ground
starting on September 17. That was the GA’s doing.

Others, it seems, have taken it upon themselves to fill the GA’s media vacuum of their own accord. One document being circulated and discussed online is “Occupy Wall Street—Official Demands,” dated September 20 of 2013, which includes detailed proposals for reforming the financial system, none of which has been approved by the GA.

“This is definitely not ours,” says Marisa Holmes, a facilitator of
the GA since the first planning meetings. “All decisions made by the GA
are made in this space.”

Worse, thanks to some imaginative theorizing by Aaron Kein of the
right-wing online publication WorldNetDaily, the idea began circulating
that the movement was “closely tied” with ACORN, SEIU and that it took
its inspiration from the Weather Underground; George Soros; and,
ultimately, President Obama himself. Five minutes at a GA meeting would
easily disabuse one of such associations. The GA had no official
organizational ties and, besides a food fund that has been stuck in an
inaccessible WePay account, almost no money. Many wish that they had the
support of unions, but so far they still don’t.

What’s actually underway at Liberty Plaza is both simpler and more
complicated: music making, sign drawing, talking, organizing, eating,
marching, standoffs with police and (not enough) sleeping. It’s a
movement in formation. As protesters sometimes like to chant, “This Is
Just Practice.” There are a handful of guys with Anonymous Guy Fawkes
masks backward on their heads, but they’re just one affinity group among
many. O’Brien didn’t appear on the plaza for a couple of days—she was
“running the back-end,” she says—and there has been almost no talk of
“One citizen. One dollar. One vote.” Adbusters sends the occasional
package of posters in the mail and offers confusing advice to organizers
on the ground. Nobody’s exactly sure yet who is doing what, but they’re
learning.

For the most part, the occupation is riding the momentum started in
the GA meetings that were going on for a month and a half beforehand.
They built a community of people who trust each other, who have a sense
for each other’s skills and who are in some basic agreement about ends
and means.

In the revolutions and uprisings and occupations that have been
taking place around the world since the beginning of this year, there
has been a lot of talk about the mobilizing power of social media—of the
Twitters and Facebooks and cell phones. But when the Egyptian
government shut down the Internet and the cellular signals in January,
the movement there carried on. One of the deciding factors that brought
down Mubarak, in the end, was not some Twitter hashtag, but a
general strike organized by traditional labor unions. The Internet can
help (as well as hurt) a movement, but it’s no replacement for actual
relationships among actual people, building actual trust through
actually working together over a period of time.

“I could have a political discussion just on the Internet,” says web
developer Drew Hornbein, who is on the GA’s Internet Committee, “but
it’s nice to get out like this.” When he started attending GA meetings
in August, he got excited, thinking, “This is something really real.
This could really be something.”

It paid off to quit the Internet, go
to where people actually are and bring them back.

So it has become. But everyone at Liberty Plaza knows the movement
has to be bigger for it to have the effect they want to see. Whole
swaths of Americans—from racial minorities to disgruntled Wall
Streeters—are underrepresented among the occupiers. Not everyone, it
seems, is quite so glued to Twitter as the young radical set. They’ve
had to start scrambling to relearn how to make fliers, reach out to
membership organizations and find people where they are to make the
movement’s numbers grow.

On Thursday evening, a surprise march of hundreds mourning the
execution of Troy Davis in Georgia set out for Liberty Plaza from Union
Square, led by occupiers. Police made attempts to stop it with
barricades and clubs and arrests, but they couldn’t; and when the
marchers arrived, the numbers in the plaza swelled. There were a lot of
new faces and new kinds of faces. It paid off to quit the Internet, go
to where people actually are and bring them back.

In the GA that night, Ted Actie, who lives in Brooklyn and works for
On the Spot, a minority-owned talk-show production company, called on
the protesters to speak more directly to the communities around them.
“You do so much social networking,” he said, “you forget how to
socialize.”

Interested?

Václav Havel called it “the power of the powerless.” How regular people,
from Denmark to Liberia, have stood up to power—and won.

How online activism can help us understand how real change is made.

Now’s the time to challenge economic orthodoxy—but only a massive social movement can turn things around.

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Nathan Schneider is an editor of Waging Nonviolence. He writes about religion, reason, and violence for publications including The Nation, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Commonweal, Religion Dispatches, AlterNet, and Truthout, where this article first appeared.. He is also an editor at Killing the Buddha. Visit his website at TheRowBoat.com.